What Made America So Beautiful

They wrote the words and music to America the Beautiful, but poet Katharine Lee Bates and church organist Samuel Augustus Ward never met.

Indeed, the writer and musician never even corresponded about the accidental collaboration that became one of the nation's sentimental anthems.

Ward died before the music he wrote, a church hymn inspired by a majestic day spent with family and friends at New York's Coney Island, became a popular piece of the national fabric.

And the humble Bates, who casually referred to the poem as "A the B," made only $5 profit from its initial publication in The Congregationalist, a church publication.

It's these snippets of history that make the song so compelling to ABC news correspondent Lynn Sherr.

"The song really has a fascinating story that is as American as the words and music," she says. "But so many people don't know it."

Sherr, who reports for the ABC news magazine 20/20, began researching her new book, America the Beautiful, The Stirring True Story Behind Our Nation's Favorite Song, (Public Affairs Books, $25) about 11/2 years ago. Then, she had no idea that a resurgence in the song's popularity would be one of the notes of the events of Sept. 11.

"Even before Sept. 11, I obviously thought it was an important story to tell," says Sherr, who got hooked on the song while a student at Massachusetts' Wellesley College, where Bates was an alumnus and English professor.

"[The song] has always given me goosebumps, but there's a new appreciation," she says. "You listen to [opera star] Denise Graves singing it at the National Cathedral and it's, well, it was incredible."

The story begins in 1893 when Bates, a young Wellesley professor, headed west to teach a summer course at Colorado College. She was 33 and, as Sherr notes, "The trip was a big deal. An adventure. For a young, single woman, it was a major undertaking."

Bates did not squander the opportunity. She was stirred by the "amber waves of grain" she saw in Kansas fields during a train trip. Later, on a faculty trip to the top of Pike's Peak in Colorado, she saw what she later described as the "purple mountains' majesty." There, the poem America the Beautiful was inspired. Bates wrote: "The words just floated into my mind. It is the people who sing it who make the song."

Exactly when Bates' poem was paired with Ward's music is a mystery that Sherr hasn't completely solved. Her research suggests that the first time Ward's Materna was introduced as a musical background for the poem was by the Rev. Clarence Barber in 1904 at a Protestant church in Rochester, N.Y.